Losing a Michelin star sounds like a disaster for a restaurant. For how diners rate their meal, it seems to be the opposite. A study of restaurants in Great Britain and Ireland finds that a drop in stars is followed by better consumer reviews, while gaining a star makes no measurable difference.
The study, “Can Lower(ed) Expert Opinions Lead to Better Consumer Ratings?: The Case of Michelin Stars”, is by Xingyi Li and Yiting Deng of the UCL School of Management at University College London, Puneet Manchanda of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, and Bert De Reyck of Singapore Management University. It was published online in Management Science on July 28, 2025.
Ten years of stars and reviews
The team built a dataset from the Michelin Guide for Great Britain and Ireland from 2010 to 2020. It covered 262 restaurants that held at least one star during that time and 1,257 other fine-dining restaurants that never did, which served as a pool of comparisons.
For each restaurant they collected TripAdvisor reviews, and they also gathered the profiles of 52,210 reviewers who between them had written 1,617,923 reviews. To rule out the obvious alternative that restaurants simply changed their food, the main analysis was restricted to restaurants whose menus stayed the same after the star change.
They then used two synthetic control methods, which build a tailor-made comparison restaurant out of similar non-starred places, to estimate what happened to ratings when stars were won or lost.
Lower expectations, happier diners
Gaining stars had no significant effect on ratings. Losing them did. In the synthetic difference-in-differences analysis, restaurants that lost stars saw their average TripAdvisor rating rise by 0.311 points on the five-point scale compared with their synthetic twins. Before the change, the two groups tracked each other closely.
The authors tested three explanations. The one they support is that expectations matter more than reputation. A star raises what diners expect, which makes them harder to impress, and losing it lowers the bar so the same meal feels better.
Comparing the profiles of people who reviewed before and after a star change, they found that a different mix of customers was unlikely to be the main driver. They could not entirely rule out changes on the supply side, such as service levels.
The review text told a similar story. After a restaurant lost stars, diners wrote less about value for money and were less demanding about service, and they also seemed less concerned about the food.
The pattern held in a series of robustness checks and in a replication using 73,229 OpenTable reviews of 52 starred restaurants in New York City from 2013 to 2017.
The Michelin curse, measured
Chefs and food writers have long talked about a “Michelin curse”, in which a star brings pressure and harsher critics. The paper offers data for it. In the authors’ summary, losing Michelin stars is not necessarily bad news for restaurants, at least when it comes to the customer experience, while winning them does not improve that experience in any material way.
The authors suggest the lesson reaches beyond restaurants to any business selling an experience: an expert accolade raises the bar that every future customer will judge it against.
Study Details:
- Title: Can Lower(ed) Expert Opinions Lead to Better Consumer Ratings?: The Case of Michelin Stars
- Authors: Xingyi Li, Yiting Deng, Puneet Manchanda, Bert De Reyck
- Journal: Management Science, Vol. 72, No. 3, pp. 2427-2450
- Publication Date: July 28, 2025
- DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2023.04302